One look at the album cover and you know Tony Martin made music for another era. He started as a saxophone player, forming his Red Peppers band while he was still in high school. He played sax with Woody Herman at the 1933 Chicago World Fair, but came to fame primarily as a vocalist. His biggest hits included a 1946 recording of "To Each His Own", "There's No Tomorrow" in 1950 (to the tune of the Italian ballad "O Solo Mio"), and the amusing 1950 novelty tune "I Said My Pajamas (and Put on My Pray'rs)".

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Martin did double duty during the war, first serving in the US Navy, then the US Army. In his first assignment after Army boot camp, he sang for Glenn Miller's Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra, but he later saw serious action, and won the Bronze Star.

After World War II he was a semi-regular on Walter Winchell's Lucky Strike Hour on radio, and in the early 1950s he hosted The Colgate Comedy Hour three times -- like Saturday Night Live, the show had a different host each week. From 1954-56 he hosted his own 15-minute The Tony Martin Show on NBC, singing a song, briefly chatting with a celebrity guest, and then asking viewers to stay tuned for the network's prime time nightly newscast. Martin's singing voice was sweet, but his on-screen charisma was minimal, and by the late 1950s he was an occasional guest star on The George Burns Show and Arthur Godfrey and His Friends.

He had a movie career as well, though most of his films are little remembered today. A clip of Martin and Jane Powell singing "Hallelujah", the finale from Hit the Deck, was featured in the MGM retrospective That's Entertainment, and in The Big Store, one of the Marx Brothers' lesser efforts, Martin played the disinterested new owner of the department store. Not counting numerous cameos and bit parts, his best film was the amusing bagpipe musical Let's Be Happy with Vera-Ellen, and his worst was probably Quincannon - Frontier Scout, with a non-singing Martin in the old west trying to find out how Indians obtained weapons of mass destruction -- repeating rifles.

In the 1960s he toured with his wife, singer and dancer Cyd Charisse, and in the early 1970s he recorded a uniquely lounge-lizard spin on "Aquarius" ("When the moon is in the seventh house...") from Hair. He was not related to the Tony Martin who replaced Ozzy Osbourne as vocalist for Black Sabbath.